The 10,000 Year Problem – Dr. Andrew Schmookler Podcast Interview

On Hierarchy, cooperation, and power

“I have this idea . . . it blows me away. It changes the course of my life. And I think that if people saw it that way, it would change the way we operate on this planet.” – Dr. Andrew Schmookler

The 10,000 Year Problem podcast is now live and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts!

I was introduced to Dr. Schmookler when a friend commented on one of my Linkedin posts that I must be a fan of ‘The Parable of the Tribes’, Andrews early work. I hadn’t heard of the book – which isn’t surprising, given that I have recently focused on this area – but quickly ate it up and was amazed at how much of my thinking Andrew had already done – and much more eloquently.

Imagine my excitement when he agreed to be my first guest!

In this interview, Andy walks us through the parable, shares some personal history, and will make you think about your own place in the human lexicon.

Here’s a link to the episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3cFTt5VbhT62jqxek84sxy?si=WqGln42dRzWzBLCjVwqNuw

Here’s a link to the podcast trailer: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3YIhDFKGahsIcqzAoK5g4B?si=8Ib6t5RFSH6C2Y1_qPc57g

If you prefer to read, here’s the show notes:

2:10 Set the stage with short autobiography. 1968, explosion of thinking about many things. Luxury thinking during a luxury time period. Post ww2, but vietnam and other things on the horizon. Darkness became apparent. Suffering. Torment. More than he thought. USA, Earth not as appealing as he had though. Begged the quetion, ‘why is the world not like we want it to be’, more love, justice, etc. That ain’t what we’re seeing so why not?

Andy was headed to a career in academia, but for these thoughts. Became a ‘drop out’. Eugene McCarthy campaign, bay area – berkely. ‘why didn’t we get what we wanted’ led to a moment in golden gate park where he received answers to the why and the purpose. He was ‘supposed’ to do with his life.

7:22 Privilege is not an excuse. the world is available to those who want to know. If you’re not aware, you’re not looking. You don’t have to be there to understand.

9:07 an evolutionary perspective on values. why do we want a different world?

10:50 The Parable of the Tribes. Launch, still waiting to have impact. Hard to get message across. How do we get from our present understanding to one that shows what the actual situation is, based on 10000 years ago? The unprecedented breakthrough whereby a species invents a different way of live, leaving the niche, abandoning the evolutioanry construct. We weren’t selected forbiologically. THIS IS THE PRE QUOTE. That moment. Why is this not the most important question of our time? Why have so few people called attention to this moment? Post Darwin?

14:07 The selection forces are not humans, though. It is the SYSTEM that grows out of the shift toward ‘nonnatural selection’. The disorder creates it. THe parable. It is inevitable that what is selected for is not what we would have chosen. Period. Mic drop.

15:07 any creater that breaks through into inventing it’s own way of life and removing itself from biological evolution to civilization will inevitably get swept up in a socio evolutionary process as ugly as the one we’ve been tracking for 10000 years

16:20 Darwin and why the deviation from ‘natural’. The perpetual motion machine the grass gazelle and lion. Gregory Bateson no creature can win against it’s environment for long. The competition is contained within the (synthetic) system.

20:27 Humans invented their own reality, transitioning from primates toward modernity around 12-1000 years ago. e,.g. hunter gatherering was liujke all our ancestors

23:10 The new selection by systemic forces based on what can survive a war against all. Sort of skipping the inevitable disorder part. This is anarchy and controversial. The part people are having trouble accepting.

24:18 The spirit of the gangster. Human nature is irrelevant. ANY creature will do this because they develop culture and diversity. The selective force will then select for the examples that have a lust for power, capacity for cruelty, greet, etc. DOesn’t have to be predisposed for hunting or violence. Diversity makes them exist, the new selection ‘prefers’ them. Tyranny results. LIke a pharaoh. Or somalia.

28:11 The war of all against all and the reign of power. Its UN natural selection, so traditional selection no longer works. The creation of the new choice of life is the non natural part, and the parable follows, well, naturally. We were living like primate groups, then others invent a new way of life and easily dominate – wipe out- the old ways. Survival of the ‘fittest’ and the rules of what is fit were changed by the choice. It’s nonrandom.

32:50 Off to the races: anarchy. Parallel devlopments in all known societies. There was no order to regulate what happened toward being ‘ok’. The homeostasis was broken.

34:30 The creation myth. It wasn’t a failure, it just happened. It wasn’t choices. But it is about people. And the systems are invisible. Idea is 56 years old. People today have trouble seeing systemic forces, so we think it’s about us and our choices. Religious stories about the system. Andy waxes poetic about his intellectual traiing and craft, but how underneath it all there is a human story with mythic and religious qualities. WHich lead to new ways of seeing ourselves e.g. the bible to help us understand what sort of creature we are. And the evicence that we ‘fell from grace’ is everywhere. Understanding the system might be the ‘right’ way to understand this, but we use mythos instead. Andy is trying to supplant the myth with the truth. 38:20 could be a good sound byte toward this.

40:30 Optimism and Andy’d 80 year perspective. any creature in any universe wanting civilization will have to order it’s civ well enough and soon enough to prevent it from destroying itself. We must remain optimistic that this can still happen. The past 50 years make that challenging due to the grotesqueness of reality and the exact opposite situation we have from what we want. 180 inversion. BUT, history keeps unfolding.

42:37 the challenge to reorder the world. so we 1) don’t destroy ourselves through war, 2) we have to order or civilization in terms of ecological impact toward sustainability and away from collapse. Currently we are not doing those things.

45:20 What we can do now

47:07 Trampling. No one gets the outcome they want because the system leads to being trampled or being a trampler. We have to order our civilization away from this. Fire drills as a metaphor for preparing.

51:50 If andy ran the zoo. ideas about ordering the world have been around a long time. But how to DO it? FDR, the UN other people have tried. WOodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. We don’t need ideas. Schmookkler

7:22 Privilege is not an excuse. the world is available to those who want to know. If you’re not aware, you’re not looking. You don’t have to be there to understand.

9:07 an evolutionary perspective on values. why do we want a different world?

20:27 Humans invented their own reality, transitioning from primates toward modernity around 12-1000 years ago. e,.g. hunter gatherering was liujke all our ancestors

32:50 Off to the races: anarchy. Parallel devlopments in all known societies. There was no order to regulate what happened toward being ‘ok’. The homeostasis was broken.

45:20 What we can do now

And if you really like to read, here’s the AI generated transcript:

Speaker 4: 00:01
It is inevitable that what gets selected for isn’t what people would have chosen. But there’s no avoiding it because they’ve plunged into this new kind of situation that they didn’t anticipate, didn’t choose, can’t control.

Speaker: 00:39
Between then and now, something changed. What happened? Was it inevitable? And what did we lose along the way? More importantly, can we get any of it back? I’m Chris Bercher and this is the 10,000-year problem. A conversation about who we were, what changed to get us to where we are now, and what we might become. Each episode, I’ll talk with scientists, thinkers, and regular people doing the hard work of figuring out where we went wrong and what we can do about it. This project isn’t about romanticizing the past, but understanding who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. Let’s get into it. Today it is my esteemed pleasure to welcome Dr. Andrew Schmuckler to the 10,000-year problem. A brief summary of Dr. Schmuckler’s personal webpage says that he’s a prize-winning author, op-ed columnist, speaker, radio talk show host, and former Democratic nominee for Congress. In Virginia, for more than 50 years, his work has developed an integrative vision of the forces, especially the problematic forces, that have shaped the human world since the rise of civilization. When I first started posting about the 10,000-year problem, someone pointed out how similar my work was to a book that Dr. Schmuggler had written called The Parable of the Tribes. Embarrassingly and naively, but also with a lot of humility, I decided to investigate, read the book, and figure out what this person was talking about. And sure enough, what Dr. Schmuckler is talking about is this period of 12 to 10,000 years ago. What happened that led us to this modern city-state civilization and the warlike behavior of humans? In summary, he talks about how this process is inevitable, but what we could do about it. He’s written several other books out of weakness, healing the wounds that drive us to war, sowings and reapings, the cycling of good and evil. He has published many articles on his webpage, and you don’t have to go very far to learn a lot about Dr. Smuggler’s thoughts on his uh personal website, which I’ll link in the show notes. I see Dr. Smuggler as being a part of a movement that happened when I happened. It’s interesting for me to look back on the last 50 years and all that’s happened from Silent Spring to the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water and the Clean Air Act. Everything seemed to come out of this period in the late 60s. Uh there was a real potential for revolution that I’m not sure ever quite happened. And now, in 2026, you hear a lot of talking about even civil rights. Why did this not come to completion? What happened? It’s like all this energy rose up in this period, and I’m not sure it’s really gone anywhere. And Dr. Schmuckler is a perfect example of this because his message that he presented not long after this time period, and very much was born as he describes in the late 60s in the San Francisco Bay Area, uh, where a lot of this energy was happening, has still not become accepted in the modern vernacular, which I think is a tragedy. Uh but he is very much included, in my opinion, in this group of visionaries and deserves to be heard and more importantly, understood. And admittedly, it took me several readings of his work and listening to him speak and meeting him to truly sort of get my head around what it is that he’s saying about the 10,000 year problem, what happened to humans and what we can do about it. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. And it’s my esteemed pleasure to present to you Dr. Andrew Schmuckler. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10,000 year problem, where we investigate what happened to humans 10,000 years ago that led us to who we are today. Because if we don’t understand who we were, how can we understand who we are and who we want to be? Today, we’re fortunate to be with Dr. Andrew Schmuckler, author of a book that inspired me sort of serendipitously and maybe indirectly, uh, called The Parable of the Tribes, but also uh master of a lifetime’s body of work related to the subject that we’re going to discuss today. And uh the way that we met was because of my ignorance, uh, which I’m proud to admit uh with all humility that I did not know about his work. And someone else who read mine said, Oh, I can’t, you know, you’re so inspired by the parable. Um, this is great. And I thought, the what? And I reached out to him, and he was gracious enough to share some of his time with us today. So, Dr. Schmuckler, if you don’t mind telling us a little bit about how you got into this space of um why why we’re here, what is the ultimate question, just for a few minutes before we dig deep into the 10,000 year problem.

Speaker 4: 05:56
I wasn’t expecting to go into that autobiographical stuff, but uh there there is some. Um I was born in 1946, and so by 1968, um, which is a big year, uh I don’t know what age our listeners may be, but um uh 1968 was a year where uh things were exploding figuratively speaking, uh all over the world, in France, in China, and um certainly in the United States. And uh Vietnam War was uh at its uh most ferocious peak. Um and I was uh I had not that my life had been uh easy, but in retrospect, uh my life had been easy in the sense that I I really uh felt uh I lived in a pretty good world. Uh it was after World War II and um I won’t go into what was uh in retrospect uh pretty um pretty good time to be me. Um I discovered uh in 1968 um that there was more darkness uh and destructiveness and suffering and torment uh in the world than my image of it had been. Uh it was no longer a comfortable place to be, it was no longer an appealing place to look at, and I was aflame with the question: why is the world like this? Why isn’t it the way we would want it to be? Uh you know, we’d want it to be peaceful, we’d want it to be where it’s a lot more love and a lot less hate and justice instead of injustice, but that ain’t what we’re seeing.

Speaker 1: 07:52
Why not?

Speaker 4: 07:55
I didn’t mention the Soviet tanks uh going into Prague to suppress human freedom once again. That was part of 1968. It was and the Chicago Convention uh where the police uh who ultimately told said that they had committed a riot against the people protesting the war in Vietnam and the Democratic uh National Convention. I mean, it was a very scary time. And I was trying to figure out why it is like this. And secondarily, I had thought that I knew what I wanted to do. I hadn’t successfully finished college just then, I was uh off to graduate school, I was going to follow in my dad’s academic footsteps, and it was all cool. But all of a sudden, you know, if that’s the way the world is, if it’s so out of joint as that, is fitting into the world on the world’s terms not being also out of joint. So I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I became uh a dropout. Uh and I I worked for the Eugene McCarthy campaign go uh uh week after week in different states trying to stop the Vietnam War, and and then I ended up in the the Bay Area in Berkeley, yeah.

Speaker: 09:21
Um which was a good place to oh magical, magical place at that time.

Speaker 4: 09:27
But at a time, you know, where all the questions were open, and my question was still what is it what accounts for that? We want this, we got this. Why didn’t we get what we wanted?

Speaker 1: 09:42
So um then one day uh in Golden Gate Park uh I got a an answer um to both those questions.

Speaker 4: 09:56
I saw the why and articulating what I’d seen was what I’m supposed to do.

Speaker: 10:05
So that was that under the under the influence of uh any helpful substances given where you were at the time?

Speaker 4: 10:14
I I I refuse to answer on the grounds that they incinerate me.

Speaker: 10:18
Fair enough. Uh yeah, what a what a heady time, and I think it’s relevant that you sort of posited what the age range of the audience is because fewer of us have the perspective. The things that you just described, as I sort of go through and read on your website about your background at that age, it’s um I find I have few references, references, whereas you were having firsthand exposure to these things. And I don’t know if that’s a result of the way media is disseminated in the modern world, because certainly these things are happening. Um, but the way you started off of being privil privileged and insulated from that stuff.

Speaker 4: 10:56
The world is available to everybody to see what’s going on. I mean, if you don’t if you’re not aware of um what the Ukrainians are doing to transform uh military conflict, um well, uh you’re not aware because you haven’t been looking. Uh there’s just a lot of stuff going on. And and and I I I don’t think you gotta be there to uh experience it. Um I wasn’t in Dallas when JFK was assassinated, but that assassination is as vivid as any uh experience I’ve had in my life.

Speaker: 11:32
Well, that’s a good point, and it’s it’s a good point for everybody to sort of hear because like our experiences are real, even if we suffer from the privilege that you were sort of talking about at the beginning of being having a pretty good life relative to other parts of the world.

Speaker 4: 11:45
Yeah, but it’s it’s available, but you gotta be looking for it and open to it, and and and then the world’s got a lot to say.

Speaker: 11:54
Well, and I’m struggling with a part of this in my writing now to describe that very uh dichotomy that I think you you get at sort of being aware that there are, and I don’t necessarily want to go straight here, but um inherent values, morals um to the human existence that that are supposed to guide us to make decisions, like I need to pay attention and be aware of what’s going on in the world, and not um, I mean, you some of the things I’ve read recently from your unpublished works, I think, um get at that. And I’ve always wondered if there is a universal human value system that should in air quotes drive uh our behaviors and if they did or didn’t as part of this problem.

Speaker 4: 12:40
Let me cut in, if I may.

Speaker: 12:41
Yeah.

Speaker 4: 12:42
Um I look at things through an evolutionary perspective, meaning I to figure out what’s going on, I try to look at how it all emerged over a very long period of time.

Speaker: 12:54
100%.

Speaker 4: 12:55
And and I appreciate that your project is a 10,000-year thing, because in an evolutionary perspective, that’s when something unprecedented happened. So in the evolutionary perspective, I will be glad at some point to go into that question of values, because it is an evolutionary perspective that shows the way in which values are real and important and life-serving. But that’s further down the road. We started off on this on the question of why is the world so it is in another aspect of the evolutionary perspective that I found uh the answer to that, which uh is probably where where we ought to go.

Speaker 3: 13:42
Perfect.

Speaker 4: 13:43
Because if we’re gonna ask try to answer that question for people, if they do wonder, well, why is it that we want a world to be this way and we don’t have it? If they want to know the answer, uh we got to get there uh uh by steps.

Speaker: 14:00
The foundation has to be laid. Yeah, that this is fantastic. And I think that is um a struggle I had with your book, is sort of uh getting that getting to that point. And you tried to walk me through it, but it took me a while to sort of be like, oh, I really do have to go through this.

Speaker 4: 14:14
Yeah, you might have to read it as often as I wrote it.

Speaker 4: 14:19
You know, that first chapter, you know, I have this idea, it blows me away, it changes the course of my life. And I think that if people saw it that way, it would change the way we operate on this planet because it would put a lot of things in a fundamentally different light.

Speaker 1: 14:36
And here I am waiting to have that impact. And well, it’s hard to get it across.

Speaker 4: 14:47
It holds water, but it’s hard to get it across. And the question is how do we get from our present understanding of the human story to one that shows what our actual situation has been because it’s what we did 10,000 years ago. That is in uh an evolutionary perspective, an unprecedented breakthrough where a creature starts to not to leave the niche in which it evolved biologically first time and inventing a different way of life, which means leaving the system that evolved biologically for over three and a half billion years and entering into something that had never existed before, which is something that wasn’t didn’t get selected for in a biological process that assures that there’s a kind of synergy that makes the system viable. So it’s that moment where and it’s really strange to me how little attention thinkers since Darwin have paid to that moment that you call attention to. That where they think about the ancient world uh if they think about it at all, uh they think about uh the Greeks and the Romans and Jerusalem and um Mesopotamian, you know, and and we’ve gradually broadened to recognize that it was humanity was doing it uh all over the planet in six different places. And they think when you get up to these giant empires, uh you know, that is the um the dividing line, they think, between life before then and life after them. That is not the dividing line. Right. That is the product of what happened as soon as you crossed out of the natural order and created this new kind of system, which uh is not well ordered.

Speaker: 17:05
Well, you talk about that sum too, sort of like the disorder part of it, which I think is fascinating, and hopefully we’ll hit that. Because I would like for nothing more than to hear you sort of capture the the whole story, but I don’t know if that’s possible to do in this sort of thing.

Speaker 4: 17:20
You throw me pictures, and I’ll you know, we’ll improvise this dance. Okay, yeah, I’ll do my best to um serve the readers and you’ll do your best to keep the story, yeah.

Speaker: 17:30
Because I think I call this non-natural selection. You know, I view humans as being the first sort of engineers, not of just ecosystems, but cultural engineers who designed a new selection force.

Speaker 4: 17:41
You know, so it’s that that and so But the what

Speaker 4: 17:44
my idea is the selection force that we should worry about isn’t something humans are doing. The selection force is a systemic force that inevitably grows out of the nature of this new unprecedented system. The disorder generates a process of selection. And the issue is what does it select for? And and that’s where my parable attributes power. Yeah, that uh that it is inevitable that what gets selected for isn’t what people would have chosen. But there’s no avoiding it because they’ve plunged into this new kind of situation that they didn’t anticipate, didn’t choose, can’t control.

Speaker: 18:33
Couldn’t see coming. Because I I I call this like a disjunct between the the this the hardware had evolved too quickly for the software to sort of catch up with it.

Speaker 4: 18:44
There’s nothing wrong with uh with the hardware. I I have a line.

Speaker 4: 18:49
Um any creature on any planet, anywhere in the cosmos, that makes the breakthrough into inventing its own way of life, extricating itself out of the niche in which it had previously been emerging over uh eons, any creature that breaks through to civilization will inevitably get swept up in a social evolutionary process as ugly and destructive as the one that we’ve been uh tracking for uh 10,000 years.

Speaker: 19:25
Okay, that’s what I’d like. Can we can we dig into that some? Because I sort of struggle with because to me, I’m an evolutionary biologist, my background. Um, you know, when two species compete for a resource, Darwin’s finches are a good example, that competition drives speciation. And so necessarily in the process of speciation, and a species develops a new niche. And so, what’s the difference in in this process that you’re describing and sort of the natural speciation process?

Speaker 4: 19:56
Darwin, we could go into what there was about the 19th century Britain that uh made this way of looking at things um natural, you know, the the struggle for power, um the survival of the fittest, nature red and tooth and claw, all that stuff is uh very good in an imperialistic capitalistic dynamo of Great Britain at the time. But the reality is that what is being selected for is a whole system that fits together. It isn’t just Darwin’s finches. Um you’ve got predators and prey, which is nature-ridden tooth and claw, you’ve got parasites and hosts, but all that is subsumed in something which has been also selected for, because what what is selected for is what works. So I have this line that I like to use the lion and the zebra and the grass work together to create a a perpetual motion machine even as they devour each other. So the evolutionary perspective has to recognize we’re not just talking about competing species. The competition itself is contained within a system uh which um what’s his name? Gregory Bateson has once said no creature can win against its environment for long. So it’s not winners and losers, it’s the system is going to win because that’s what’s selected for. Uh the competition is contained within our synergistic. And even though other things might come in from the non living, non evolved cosmos, like uh a huge asteroid hitting the planet and wiping out most of Species on Earth. And there have been volcanic times which brought a uh kind of nuclear winter on the planet. But those are not things that life controls.

Speaker 2: 22:14
Right, right.

Speaker 4: 22:15
Within the system of life, even if the dinosaurs get wiped out, well, okay, there’s a big injury. It takes a long time to really start repairing all that. I I I’ve checked into it. I think it took a million to three million years, uh, which is a long time from our point of view.

unknown: 22:34
Yeah.

Speaker 4: 22:36
Before the system of life on Earth was really starting to regenerate. And since there were new niches, it would be uh some opportunities that hadn’t existed before, which is why we mammals uh probably if it hadn’t been for that asteroid, uh I don’t know this, but uh if it hadn’t been for that asteroid, I’m not sure we would have uh become so dominant on this planet. But we had the opportunity and we seized it. But those things that come from the outside can really mess up the system.

Speaker: 23:12
Yeah, they’re not w part of the system, or they are, but at such a scale that it doesn’t.

Speaker 4: 23:16
But when we started inventing our own life, that opened up a door to a destructive force that was coming from within the biological system. A uh a species of earth has just taken this unprecedented step and it has left the uh the order in which it evolved and is imposing a new order, it’s domesticating plants and animals, and um just doing stuff that wasn’t part of what we got selected for biologically. It was facilitated by the fact that this species got to the point where it had the creative intelligence to start inventing. I don’t, you know, it’s it’s not like chimpanzees that we departed from seven million years ago or something on that order. It’s not like they were about to create a whole different way of uh and our species mostly stayed continuous with that all the way up to that 10,000 years or 12 or whatever.

Speaker 2: 24:26
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 24:28
The hunting-gathering bands, I say, are fundamentally a a cont continuation of the primate bands that were further back in our background in terms of their size, in terms of their structure, in terms of the way they lived on the earth. They hunted what was already out there, they gathered what was already out there, just like lions hunt and just like uh chimps gather. That’s what we were doing until this creative intelligence starts uh uh inventing something new. Gardens herding into a corral, the things they used to hunt, planting themselves, some of the things they used to gather. That’s new. And that opens the door, and that’s where my the rest of my comes in. What happens when you’ve got something which is new?

Speaker: 25:40
Right. And what it and what and I appreciate that systems level thing because I think that’s part of what’s never caught on is and I never thought about imposing it on Darwin like that, Darwin being a you know, sort of a reductionist, reducing the system’s variability to you know evolutionary mechanisms, which is pretty exciting.

Speaker 4: 25:58
No, I I his pro what I was talking about, their problem was that they only saw it at at the individual species.

Speaker: 26:06
Yeah, yeah. And so cultural. I’m almost the perfect person to get into this question though, because I’m so naive about it. It gives me that beginner’s mind perspective because it’s all new. Like I had never I had thought about the parable without realizing I was thinking about the parable and getting down that road a couple of steps, whereas you’ve been down yourself thoroughly down the road. Uh and like I just recently discovered Joe Henrich and this idea of um cultural evolution, that these selection forces work at the group, and now you’re sort of suggesting system level just as well, and sort of make ecological decisions about what types of systems persist through time.

Speaker 4: 26:46
And so, I mean if the issue is what is doing the selection on basis of what criteria?

Speaker: 26:52
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 26:53
And so I mean our problem is that a systemic force was doing the selection, and the criteria were what can survive a war of all against all? And that that jumps over a step, which is the disorder that we mentioned, right?

Speaker: 27:13
Because that’s inevitable.

Speaker 4: 27:15
Makes inevitable a war of all against all. Now that people may not be willing to take that uh and run with it yet, but that is the nature of the anarchy, is that it inevitably devolves into, and we’ve seen it in our lifetime. Anarchy does that.

Speaker: 27:33
Oh, yeah. Well, and I I would to what degree does that it seems like I’m not trying to help the reader, but the way you just said it, it makes it very sound very clear that we have this capacity in us because we kill things, you know, because we’re predators, you know, we have the capacity for killing.

Speaker 4: 27:49
I’m not saying that. I’m not talking about human nature.

Speaker 4: 27:53
Human nature is fundamentally irrelevant. That’s why the any creature on any planet thing the inevitability thing, yeah. You know that if a creature is developing culture, which humans were before this unprecedented step, you know that they must be capable of plasticity. Because that baby might grow up to speak this language, or it might grow up to speak that language, it might grow up to think this way. I mean, there’s cultural diversity, and culture means that there’s gonna be on the table a whole huge variety of human ways of being.

Speaker: 28:39
Solution and diversity. Yeah.

Speaker 4: 28:41
So if you have a selective force that’s gonna select for what I call the spirit of the gangster, I mean, that’s I’m I’m jumping a few steps, but it’s okay. The spirit of the gangster, if there’s they’re gonna have no trouble finding some examples of that species that have a lust for power, that have a capacity for cruelty, that are greedy. You can get any any creature, even if it’s not a hunter in the biological past, is gonna have the capacity to be sh to take that kind of a shape. And if there’s a selective process that wants the gangster-like traits to be running the show, it will find humans that can do it. So, like when Somalia uh became a failed state in the early 90s and anarchy broke out because the government just it was no longer a government. That’s the anarchy. And what happens? Pretty soon, you’ve got these warlords that are running everything and fighting with each other. That’s inevitable, and that’s what happened to our species once we got into a war of all against all. It didn’t happen overnight, right? But by the after 5,000 years, in all the places where civilization emerged, it has some fundamental things in common, which is it’s generally a tyranny in which the mass of people are in some kind of bondage and are being used by the gangster-like power on top. That may be a little harsh if talking about Pharaoh or, you know, but you know, Pharaoh might seem like a groovy guy, but the whole system is set up that he gets to build his monuments with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of slaves. How did hunter-gatherers who had it not so terrible get to that?

Speaker: 30:51
Well, and and well, there’s three at least three things in here that I’d love to go hear your thoughts on. One is why in natural selection terms, the is did um competition to to to put you know a general term on this, or gangster type traits, why was that selected for against something like cooperation? Uh and then um why does the gangster motif not end in a one man standing? Because if if that if if violence is the um yeah, and I forget what the third one is. That’s enough.

Speaker 4: 31:31
Let’s go back to the the the first one.

Speaker: 31:33
Repeat that please. So why why did why what was it about the dark triad, as I would call sort of personality types, or the gangster violent? Why would natural selection choose that over something like cooperation?

Speaker 4: 31:47
It’s not natural selection.

Speaker: 31:49
We’re talking about a second selection. So that’s the force itself.

Speaker 4: 31:53
Yeah, that see, okay, so let’s say a creature takes this step that it’s inventing its own way of life. That’s the step that’s breaking out of the natural order. The natural order was a place in which the interactions among the actors were all had been selected for to make sure that it was consistent with the viability of the whole system, the lion, zebras, all that. But

Speaker 4: 32:26
now there’s a new system where you’ve got these different uh kinds of life forms, these civilizing societies that were not shaped by biological evolution, but are the product of the imagination of this smarter than any of the other creatures, uh, and cross the threshold in which they start inventing a lot of stuff. I mean, this is not the first step. We get to control fire, we develop languages, um, we start painting on cave walls, we are going in the direction of culture, but we’re still living like primate groups. Now we’re not living like primate groups. We have a bunch of societies that are within reach of each other, that are not living like primate groups, their interactions are not governed by anything that was selected over eons of uh of natural selection.

Speaker 4: 33:23
And it’s not they’re not governed by anything else. It is anarchy. So if you go anarchy, the next step is a war of all against all, and then the next step is that means that some societies will prevail, will will survive this war of all against all with their cultural ways. And some societies will not survive because that’s what happens when you’ve got this warring shtick going on. Oh, and is it random which ones do? No, no, it’s not, because um, the ones that survive, by definition, will be the ones that have what it takes.

Speaker: 34:05
Yeah, and do the same thing.

Speaker 4: 34:06
Prevail in a war of all against all, just like those guys in Somalia had what it took to rise out of the however many Somalis there were to be the guys with the machine guns and the jeeps and all that stuff. They were not random.

Speaker: 34:22
Right.

Speaker 4: 34:23
So what you’ve got is selection for the ways of uh I use the word power, and I define power conveniently uh as whatever it takes to survive, prevail in a war of all against all. And there are a lot of things that contribute to the ability to survive. But you know, there’s social organization, there can be political organization, economic systems, technology, all kinds of ways of bringing up your kids. Why is it that this group defeated that group? Well, this group’s got better coaching, you know, whatever the game is.

Speaker: 35:06
They got better funding.

Speaker 4: 35:07
But war of all against all is not a happy game. So you can have some really wonderful human possibilities of running a culture that can’t stand up to their uh gangster neighbor. And so those wonderful cultural possibilities get taken off the table, and the gangster neighbor gets to impose his uh not so wonderful ways because he’s the guy who could prevail in an inevitable war of all against all that was the inevitable result of breaking out of the natural order.

Speaker: 35:44
Yeah, and so that part uh that’s beautiful. Thank you for the uh further explanation. And now I now I think you know, part of breaking out of the non of the natural world into a non-natural selective system, part of that is it a choice? Is the is the initiation, but part of that is brings with it to this evident inevitability of the anarchy and disorder because it comes along with it.

Speaker 4: 36:14
Because it’s once once you get into a system that where the interaction of the of the various parts of the system, in this case civilizing societies, once you get out of into uh a system that has nothing to govern how they will interact, you’re inevitably off uh off to the races, right? Which is

Speaker 4: 36:37
why off to the races in Mesopotamia and in the Indus Valley and in the Yellow River in China and in Mesoamerica and the Incan in Peru, and not to mention going back to Egypt and our pharaohs, in every one of those cases, there’s a kind of a parallel development, which is what you would expect if you’ve got a selective process of societies that were inevitably having to deal with each other outside of any order that makes sure that what happens is okay. Like the order of the biosphere was that lion zebra grass thing. Didn’t make the mean that the zebra was safe from the lion, but it did mean that unperturbed the system was going to keep lions and zebras going.

Speaker: 37:31
This is fascinating because I I see everything as sort of like almost like a Shakespearean story or like um a Joseph Cambelian, you know, story arc, where and and I try to use those terms just for myself. So hopefully this isn’t a digression, but it’s like, you know, the story is as we as we saw an opportunity for this or or what the inevitability of our neurological prowess led to this sort of non-natural system, we didn’t appreciate sort of the responsibility that came with that. That either meant we had to continue to follow the same rules or write new ones.

Speaker 4: 38:10
We had no there was no escape from this.

Speaker 4: 38:13
It it wasn’t a failure.

Speaker: 38:16
Yeah, yeah, right.

Speaker 4: 38:17
It wasn’t uh I I’ve used the I’ve used the uh image of trampling, because a lot of people have trouble understanding how how it could possibly be that understanding the human story uh isn’t just about understanding what people chose to do and did.

Speaker 2: 38:36
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 38:37
It’s all about people, you know. But but the s systems tend to be invisible. So is this okay for me to go with a channel?

Speaker: 38:46
Absolutely, yeah. I think you’re going right where I need to go.

Speaker 4: 38:48
So a lot of people, and you know, I’ve I got this idea uh 56 years ago, uh next month. Wow. Uh so I’ve been talking to a lot of people.

Speaker: 39:00
Uh yeah, over my lifetime.

Speaker 4: 39:05
A lot of people have trouble seeing that there’s such a thing as systemic forces. Now, if you don’t see the systemic forces, then everything you see around us is a is a reflection of human nature.

Speaker: 39:20
Yeah, or a choice, like you were saying, yeah.

Speaker 4: 39:22
Which is how the Bible uh shows it to be. Yeah, yeah. We’re such a corrupt species. He looked the the biblical uh uh observer, looks out at the world and seeing it through God’s eyes, repents of having ever created this mess. This is right there. I’m not making this up.

Speaker: 39:41
No, I know, I know. It’s like I was saying, it’s almost Shakespearean, but I guess it’s more biblical.

Speaker 4: 39:45
But you know, I I appreciate your bringing that in because even though my training, starting mostly with my dad, is intellectual, um, how to think clearly and infer eviden uh get conclusions from the evidence. That was dad. Uh and that’s my that’s my craft. But underneath this, there is a human story that does have mythic uh qualities and does lead to new ways of seeing ourselves than the one that the, for example, Western civilization has looked to the Bible to understand what kind of creatures we are. We’re the ones that were told one simple thing don’t do, and went right ahead and did it. We’re the creature that was so full of sin that God repented of having made us and decided to wipe out humanity except for Noah and his family.

Speaker: 40:52
And many people come back to the Garden of Eden story to explain this inevitability that you know toward anarchy that you’re talking about.

Speaker 4: 41:00
It makes sense because you look around and what do you see? I mean, you see Gaza, you see the mess in Iran, you see uh uh Ukraine.

Speaker: 41:12
You don’t have to look far. Yeah, you don’t have to look far.

Speaker 4: 41:14
Uh there’s a lot of ugliness out there, and and i if your sense of the human story doesn’t provide you a way uh to exp understand the ugliness uh that isn’t a reflection of human nature, you’re just gonna naturally conclude, yeah, God created a really raunchy species with us. But

Speaker 4: 41:38
uh actually, uh if you look at it through what I think is the proper lens, where we can see the systemic dynamics of the story of life on earth and the story of the emergence of civilization, it becomes a different human story where we are we are in a sense the victims of our own special qualities. We had this creative intelligence which allowed us to do what no other creature could have done. But lo and behold, we’ve unleashed something we can’t control yet.

Speaker: 42:14
Yeah. Yeah, well, okay, this is perfect. Man, and that and thank you. Again, what’s coming to mind now in my limited sort of pop culture references is uh a quote from one of the Spider-Man comics, which was probably, you know, obviously somebody else said it first, but it but that is with great um respon with great power comes great responsibility, and it’s sort of like, okay, these things happened, they were inevitable, they’re not our fault. We can either choose to tell some story about how it’s not our fault, and that’s okay, I’m allowed to be an asshole, or I can be a good person, it doesn’t really matter. Or there’s some going back to sort of the universal value system, is there some and I don’t want to use the word responsibility, but I will, um which gets it sort of another mythos, like Gaia, uh, that w it’s our responsibility to do something about this. Like maybe we’ve ended up in a place we don’t want to be, and what? And that’s okay, and we need to change it, and we have a responsibility to change it.

Speaker 4: 43:17
Like, what are your thoughts about what we I’ll continue to resist going down into deep into the whole issues of values and and the shoulds and responsibilities, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the moral I I do have uh some writings which use the evolutionary perspective to establish that the moral dimension, which a secular worldview has has given second grade status to, is real, important, and life serving. So it’s really important to talk about values, but I I I want to step back in instead and continue to look at this in systemic terms, um, which is I say that any uh creature on any Planet that begins a process on the path of civilization will have to meet this challenge, which is to order its civilization well enough and soon enough to prevent it destroying itself. We humans right now I don’t know the future. I I think about it a lot, but I I’ve come up with it’s a a toss-up. Whether we will destroy ourselves or get our act together.

Speaker: 44:41
You’re more optimistic than I am.

Speaker 4: 44:46
When I first got these ideas, uh what was happening in America allowed for a lot more bright view of um yeah what we can accomplish than present-to-day events lead us to have. I mean, the grotesqueness of it being just the opposite of what we want in charge. You know, whether it’s um totally uh moving money from uh wind power to give more money to the fossil fuel industry. I mean, that is sort of emblematic of uh uh of you got the wrong thing.

Speaker: 45:28
180 degrees wrong. Like it’s fine.

Speaker 4: 45:32
It’s hard, but on the other hand, uh you know, history keeps unfolding. And nobody, I don’t think, saw this coming.

Speaker: 45:41
Yeah, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 4: 45:42
Uh I I grew up in the America of all late Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy Johnson, Nixon Ford, Carter, Reagan, first Bush, Bill Clinton, uh, and then uh you know there’s darkness starting to uh form on the horizon, which uh which I called out, but uh the people who needed to listen were thinking uh still politics as usual. But that’s a whole other dimension of things.

Speaker: 46:11
That is a whole and a and a story

Speaker: 46:12
in and of itself.

Speaker 4: 46:13
We’ve got the challenge to find a way to reorder the world so that one we don’t destroy ourselves through war or nuclear holocaust or some such thing. Uh because if we keep on playing Russian roulette with heavily armed nuclear superpowers, uh eventually you get to the uh what is it called, the uh in the revolver. When you play Russian roulette, what’s that called? Anyway, the chamber.

Speaker: 46:45
The chamber, yeah, the bullets in the chamber, yeah.

Speaker 4: 46:47
Eventually you get to that chamber the the the bullets in.

Speaker: 46:50
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 46:51
So you can’t keep on playing that game forever, uh, you know, and come out alive.

Speaker: 46:55
Talk about inevitable.

Speaker 4: 46:56
Yeah. And then we also have to order our civilization well enough and soon enough in terms of our ecological impact, so that we are living in a way that can go on forever and doesn’t uh essentially collapse uh the biological substratum of our lives. So those are the two ways we can destroy ourselves. And right now we are not well ordered uh to uh protect ourselves. Uh you know, nuclear war has been discussed again uh lately, uh both over Ukraine and also what if China invades Taiwan? Uh I don’t see any guarantees on the table. Um and when it comes to climate change, we can already see that a huge price is being paid. And uh I I don’t pretend to know, and I’m not sure if anybody actually does, but I don’t, how big will this be? Uh even if we start acting responsibly, to use your word. But we we know if we know what the human story is about, which is bringing a destructive force under control by creating an order to control it.

Speaker 4: 48:15
If we if we recognize that that’s the job, and the alternative is quite likely self-destruction in the next I don’t know. I talk about two centuries, but you know, I’m not sure. That’s fair. I’m not sure.

Speaker: 48:29
But less doomer than most.

Speaker 4: 48:31
Yeah, it’s it’s less doomer than uh yeah.

Speaker 3: 48:35
Yeah.

Speaker 4: 48:35
Um but I I think that if we’re still a going concern in two centuries, it will mean that we’ve got taken important steps in the direction of creating the order that civilization inevitably arose without.

Speaker: 48:52
Yeah, no, I’d like to I I I get it. I get it.

Speaker 4: 48:56
It’s only because we now have a not necessarily a unified world, but a world in which everybody’s in can be in touch with everybody.

Speaker: 49:06
We’re connected.

Speaker 4: 49:07
It is possible for the representatives of humankind to sit down together uh at a table and come up with something like, yeah, we’re gonna take these steps to protect the ozone layer. You know, it it and that could not have been done until you know recent times. But now it can be done. And we’re not thinking about the human story that way, and we’re not working to take the steps that would enable us. I mean, we do do that, like a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. I mean, that’s a step. I I I I it’s not like I don’t appreciate what a lot of people have done. And the Paris uh um, you know, we’re we’re gonna reduce our emissions to such and such and such and such, and and and it it’s not worthless, but it sure is it sure is short of impressive.

Speaker: 50:00
Well, it’s it’s not oh I don’t want to say it’s too little too late, but it’s almost like and and I get and I feel this when I read your work. There’s an intent under all of this that relates to the system. And I think one, like what you’re saying, is I I get now why everyone has to learn to think in systems. Like it’s a nice little thing to say, and it’s almost like pop culture nowadays, and it’s very cliche to say I think in systems, I’m a systems thinker. But we have to learn to do that in order to understand the problem in the first place, and of course to come up with new rules about those systems.

Speaker 4: 50:34
Let me let me go back to something I dropped the ball. Um I picked up a different ball. Uh

Speaker 4: 50:39
that go back to trampling, I wanted to say. I think we can, in a way, sum up this session. Um and I’d be happy to continue.

Speaker 2: 50:51
Absolutely.

Speaker 4: 50:52
Uh with trampling. I I I’ve I’ve read about incidents uh where um a fire starts in some nightclub uh that’s crowded, and um it turns out that maybe the doors don’t turn outward, they turn inward. So the press of people trying running for their lives is such that nobody gets the outcome they want. It’s because the system uh means that you’re gonna either you’re you’re gonna get trampled, or at best, you’re gonna be one of the tramplers. Even though when you went in there and you had a cocktail and you danced, it was the furthest thing from your mind that you wanted to climb over somebody who uh uh leaving them to burn to death.

Speaker: 51:57
Sure.

Speaker 4: 51:58
So then when I talk about ordering our civilization, I mean that’s that’s sort of the way you can see that there are situations that are not to be explained in terms of this is what people want, this is what people choose. It’s imposed on them by the nature of the situation. And civilization, the rise of civilization is one of those. But by contrast, I remember being a kid in uh elementary school, uh uh East Lansing, Michigan, for what that’s worth. Um uh and and we would do these fire drills, you know. Uh they were scheduled, and we would practice. This is what we do if there’s a fire. We stand up, we march out in this order, and we march out that dog door uh onto the playground, and none of us is gonna burn to death, nobody’s gonna be trampled. That’s because the school anticipated what the problem is gonna be if such and such happens, and they have created an order so that the part so that what we want to get is what we get, not what the system imposes on us. Yeah, and that’s like where our situation is with civilization. It’s not our fault. We were just being creatively intelligent, we figured a way out of the the lockbox that every other creature was in. Oh, but that created a situation that we couldn’t control, which generated a force that we couldn’t control, and that eventually, as the world comes together so we’re not so fragmented, and we actually could create an order, we do the equivalent of what the schools did about the fire drill. We get no, yeah, that’s a we we govern people’s behavior, we make sure that the worst impulses don’t get expressed, we make sure that the best impulses get encouraged, we create a different kind of civilization than the one that was compelled we are compelled to because we unwittingly unleashed a selective force that made the spirit of the gangster way more influential on how civilization would develop than it should have been.

Speaker: 54:18
For the first time and struggling with a lot of your work, I I think I understand. And and some of it for me is semantics. Um But I like how you free us from the struggle of worrying about whether we’ve done something wrong or whether it’s a mistake. It’s almost like you’re saying we don’t need to we have to understand that, and now we can move forward. And I almost want to apologize for making you go through all these things again because I know you’ve thought about this at length many times, but that fire drill is.

Speaker 4: 54:50
I just apologize. I I I I found I found your pitches were always, always uh uh so someplace where I could get some bat on the ball.

Speaker: 55:01
Good perfect. Well, that fire drill one is uh, and again, uh you know, on the one hand, maybe you spontaneously just made that up, but I have a lot of things. Oh, I didn’t feel I have a feeling that you’ve worked on that and it and it lands.

Speaker 4: 55:11
It’s fairly recent, but uh but uh Okay, well that’s it.

Speaker: 55:16
You know, we is okay. We didn’t know we had to make new rules. We didn’t know what we were what’s happening required a new set of rules. Now we do, like the fire controls.

Speaker 4: 55:25
Even if even if somebody knew,

Speaker 4: 55:27
and you can go back to the 16th 17th century Europe, where there are all these dynamics of all of war against all against all, uh uh much more vivid than uh than China, for example. There are people who are putting out ideas about ordering the world uh in a way that made it possible to put an end to the dominance of the selection for power, uh, the war of all against all. But it’s one thing to say it.

Speaker 2: 56:01
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 56:01
They were in no position to institute it. And it’s not clear, uh, I mean, if somebody if I ran the zoo, uh I I know what kind of steps I would and and some American presidents in my lifetime have have taken important steps in that direction. For example, out of the nightmare of uh World War II, uh uh my favorite president, FDR, um he I mean he was dead by the attack, you know, a few months uh before the war was over, but he had set in motion that there was going to be a United Nations, which was gonna have a certain kind of charter and certain kind of rules, and but no way of enforcing them. But it was a step. Uh it he achieved what Woodrow Wilson had also tried to achieve after World War I uh when he went to Versailles and he wanted uh uh the League of Nations. Uh um so uh the ideas have been there about we can’t just keep going, particularly in an age of nuclear weapons. I mean, it’s one thing to muddle through with the European wars of the 17th, 18th, 19th century. Yeah, with bayonets and the 20th, too. But now that we’ve got uh uh powers that have got what between one and two thousand warheads that are deliverable in minutes, um uh you just don’t want to mess around with that anymore. Muddling through used to be an option.

Speaker 1: 57:37
But as our powers have gotten greater, both in weaponry and in environmental impact, muddling through ceases to be uh it’s it’s really either get it our act together or die.

Speaker 4: 57:53
The the middle option that we’ve uh survived for 10,000 years with just muddling through is gradually disappearing.

Speaker: 58:02
Yeah, you can only prop us up with technology for so long if for no other reason than the source of the energy is going to run out.

Speaker 4: 58:10
Well, you can only wreck your environment for so long, and in an age of nuclear weapons, you can only spin the the the barrel or the uh uh of the revolver so many times. Um the stakes have in my lifetime, or at least a little bit more, and I’m 80. Uh it’s the big the first time we ever saw how we really could destroy ourselves. Not some kind of um Christian uh apocalypse uh world ending, but we actually could do it with what we do, both in the war system and then now with climate change, we can see that we are so much bigger bull in the ecological China shop than we were in the 19th century. It’s all visible, and muddling through is not an option.

Speaker: 59:03
Yeah, you can’t, it’s undeniable at this point. And I think what I’m what’s emerging, and I and I know to be respectful of your time, one, it seems like we’re getting to a point where we can kind of close this and maybe, and and like you said, I’d love to invite you for more of this and open up the next kind of chapter. But it’s almost like for me the problem has simplified a little bit, and maybe I should have known this all along. Is is we’re still trying to convince people of something. Like we’re still trying to get people to read your book, right? We’re still trying to get people on board with an idea.

Speaker 4: 59:36
And uh I would say uh with a picture of what our story has been driven by. What you’re talking about, that mythos, the story of what’s actually happened to our species is not the one that we walk around with in our head.

Speaker 1: 59:55
It is this it is this creature that tragically, uh like the tragic hero, gets hoist by their own petard, that uh uh become the victims of their own greatest virtue, which is the ability to invent.

Speaker 1: 01:00:14
But once you start inventing certain kinds of things, the rest is gonna be inevitable.

Speaker 4: 01:00:21
You’ve plunged off the cliff, basically.

Speaker: 01:00:25
It’s almost like I know there’s a s there’s a legend or a fable in there, like I don’t know if it’s the monkey’s paw or something where it’s like the yeah, you don’t realize the gift in the magi, maybe it is where you’re getting a gift and you don’t realize that this gift also has this set of other elements that are going to happen, inevitably. And the story is okay, you’ve got the gift, you had the benefits, and now you’ve got to like pay the piper or or clean up the mess or whatever.

Speaker 4: 01:00:53
We get to be the dominant species on the planet like no other species has ever been. Uh and you and I have even greater fortune get to be on a in a society where we don’t have to worry about a roof over our heads and uh uh food on the table. Um So we get a we we get a big payoff for this invite inventiveness. We can do what we are doing with this technology, which is so incredible. We’re hundreds of miles apart, and we’re creating something that can communicate to other people. I mean, we’ve we have got a lot of stuff that we could celebrate. Uh we can put Bach on the uh on Spotify and uh it it it it’s got its benefits. But there is this dark side, this this part that we haven’t controlled, where innovation has generated a systemic force that we didn’t choose, that we wouldn’t have chosen, and that

Speaker 4: 01:02:00
only emerging in these times is there a possibility of escaping.

Speaker: 01:02:07
Beautiful. I just want to thank you for your time today. Thank you for listening to the 10,000 year problem. I’m Chris Bercher. Here you’ll find weekly interviews rotating with solo episodes about who we were 10,000 years ago so we can understand who we are now and who we want to be in the future. If you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe to the podcast and visit our Substack at the 10,000 Year Problem for longer form essays on these subjects and more. 10,000 Years brought us here. The next chapter is ours to write.

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